Anglican Mainstream survives “deplatforming attempt”

Posted on April 18, 2025 
Filed under Resources

“A UK Christian charity is urging all charity trustees to urgently risk assess their ‘cyber vulnerability’ after an unsubstantiated attack on their ministry caused Go Daddy, their cyber host, to unilaterally ‘terminate’ their website leading to loss of income and restrictions on ministry.

Anglican Mainstream (AM), a leading Anglican online news service, was informed on February 28 that Go Daddy had received one general complaint about ‘potential breach of copyright’ after it had uploaded links to news articles for educational purposes. …

Go Daddy also informed AM that hundreds of posts that they had hosted over the years had been destroyed – thereby denying AM’s lawyers any opportunity to counterclaim any copyright breach or, to present a legal defence. …”

– This news via Anglican.ink is a reminder of the era in which Christian organisations operate.

Our suggestions for Christian website owners:

This story also a reminder of the value of having a regular backup of all your data which is independent of your hosting provider. (If your backup is with your hosting provider, and they cancel your account, you lose website and backup.)

While the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine has been saving copies of Anglican Mainstream since 2014, resurrecting a site from that data would be a huge task.

For websites (like the ACL) using WordPress, there are many plugins which will allow you to save complete copies of the database and all files to your own computer or to your cloud storage. One such plugin is Updraft Plus – the premium version of which allows for backups and easy restoring of a website if something goes wrong, or migration to a new hosting company.

If your website is important to you or your organisation, do consider such a plugin.